A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERSI will suggest that the tension between religious identity and human rights discourse,
intensified by the traumatic subtext of many Jewish-Israeli identity narratives, pushes
RHR to exceed its own theoretical foundations by letting human rights practice push the
limits of its understanding of prophetic Judaism. In particular, what is exceeded is a
notion of justice and of the prophetic that relies on a clear distinction between self and
other/stranger, a distinction central both to the discourse of religious identity and to the
logic of trauma and post-trauma. I will argue that this excess is not accidental and that
the tension between human rights and religious discourse heightened by trauma narra-
tives may provide a concrete terrain for the exercise of ethical-political responsibility in
the quasi-Levinasian sense of an ability to respond directly to the presence and needs of
others/strangers rather than delegating that response to the institutions of formal politics.
At the same time, my focus on the practical, contingent nature of such responsibility is
meant to suggest that merely theoretical reconciliations of human rights and religious
identity discourses are unlikely to be able to counter the tendency of trauma-bearing
identity narratives to sustain the pursuit of exclusionary politics (or a radical version of
Levinasian ‘‘ontology’’). In the case of RHR, for instance, the combination of a prophetic
reading of Judaism and of human rights discourse creates theoretical opportunities for
acts of solidarity that in practice defy exclusionary politics; yet such opportunities must
then be translated into concrete, individual choices, which entail taking risks and negoti-
ating the costs of transgressing identity.
In the end, RHR’s example appears significant neither as an ideal model nor as a
collection of individuals with exceptional abilities to resist the temptation to self-closure
around individual or collective ‘‘Jewish wounds.’’ Rather, it is significant because it offers
religious Israelis a possibility for working around discourses of ontology/identity designed
as a shield against traumatic anxieties, as well as repositories of narcissistic affirmation,
without asking Jewish Israelis to abandon those anxieties or to bear them without the
practical, affective support of a Jewish state. Despite the obvious limitations of such an
approach, a focus on human rights practice allows RHR to remain attached to discourses
of Jewish woundedness and testimonial obligations, but to do so in a way that is both
critical and self-compassionate. Unlike some secular Israeli peace groups, RHR thus re-
frains from advocating a non-Jewish Israeli state, nor does it uphold a notion of justice
rooted in a radical openness to the ‘‘other’’ as not (only) a stranger. Instead, the group
seeks in human rights practice a viable niche for its pursuit of justice on behalf of Palestin-
ians and marginalized Israelis.
Thanks to a pragmatic negotiation of conflicting commitments to identity and to
universality, RHR’s pursuit of ‘‘limited’’ responsibility does not, then, replace Zionist
narratives with narratives of a Derridean ‘‘unconditional hospitality’’ or a ‘‘hospitality of
visitation.’’^11 Rather, this notion and practice of responsibility works in counterpoint to
these narratives. One might add that it actually exists only thanks to these narratives and
the state of Israel as a Jewish state. On the one hand, RHR initiatives are examples of
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